Step 1: Help Build the Atom Bomb. Step 2: Reinvent Your Kitchen.

This oven, made more than thirty years ago, will change your cooking. Did we mention Col. Sanders loved it?

The contemporary kitchen—or at least the restaurant versions you tend to read about here—is at the moment running headlong into the distant past and distant future, which I find weird. Some have taken to cooking over chunks of burning wood, while others cook food in sterile plastic bags in what looks like a piece of medical lab equipment. The first is fit for Homo erectus; the latter seems to have been beamed back from the transhuman far future. But the fact is the real future is already here. It's called CVap (CV stands for controlled vapor), and, as it happens, it was created for Colonel Sanders over thirty years ago.

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Nearly every major restaurant uses it: Some, like Jean-Georges and Torrisi, use it almost exclusively. Unlike live fires, which tend to dry things out (to say the least), and sous vide, which essentially stews everything inside a vacuum bag, CVap ovens can brown food—as fire does—but also let you cook with humidity control. As with sous vide, you don't have to figure out how long or to calculate at what temperature you need to cook something. If you want a medium-rare short rib, you just set the oven for the temperature of a medium-rare short rib. Then you walk away. The oven is no hotter than the finished food. And you don't have to put it inside a giant condom, either—you can actually cook something that looks as though it came out of a conventional oven.

With the first home version, the CVap Pod, on its way to the market, I called its ninety-one-year-old inventor, Winston Shelton, to talk about the device, hanging pork chops on clotheslines, the atomic bomb, and other matters.

ESQUIRE: So, Winston, let me get this straight. The whole technology was just a way to keep Kentucky Fried Chicken warm?

WINSTON SHELTON: Not just the CVap. I developed the pressure fryer [another ubiquitous food-service technology] for the colonel first. He was happy to get behind it. But sometime in the seventies, he asked me, "Why is my food drying out?" I told him, "The trouble is that your chicken is too close to Las Vegas. It's in a desert. You need your food to be closer to New Orleans."

ESQ: Meaning what?

WS: He needed vapor. It's not humidity; humidity is okay for the human comfort region, but it's imprecise. Do you understand the principle of wet-bulb heat and its use in culinary applications?

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ESQ: No.

WS: Well, I didn't really understand it either, but when the colonel asked me about it, I spent some time researching the subject and found there to be no scientific literature associated with how food holds heat. After resorting to some simple experiments including a wet sock, a dry sock, and a pork chop hanging on a clothesline, I concluded that it was water vapor that controlled the temperature of wet bodies, and that the sunshine–water vapor relationship determined the drying rate.

From the fundamentals learned, we developed a hot food holding cabinet that had precision temperature and full-range texture control—from Vegas to New Orleans! Because you want to maintain a constant evaporation rate. You can make a soft bun in it, and also a potato chip. It's very complicated, which is one reason why it took us so long to get this technology into a home version. But we have confirmed its efficacy on everything from thawing, proofing, sous vide, confit, holding, braising, roasting, baking, and steaming.

ESQ: Wait, go back for a minute. Potato chips are cooked in hot oil, not an oven. And they can't have any vapor at all, or they'll get soggy. This makes no sense.

WS: Right! Now you're thinking! The CVap will allow you to cook with no vapor, or a lot of vapor. And the presence of vapor speeds up the cooking time because of the relative pressure created in the cooking chamber. You know, Josh, I was a technician in the Manhattan Project.

ESQ: Wait, what? You were? The atom bomb?

WS: Well, I was in it without knowing I was in it. I went to basic training as a rifleman. But a first sergeant came up to the train and said he was looking for Private Shelton. He took us off at Princeton Junction. He had a bunch of us that had been to school for engineering. Company of a bunch of geniuses. They graduated us and put us in laboratories. We were never actually told what we were working on. They wanted us available for when they dropped the bomb.

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ESQ: Holy shit. Okay, so the home CVap—how far off is it?

WS: We're introducing it in the next couple of months in the high-end portion of the market. It will be expensive—around $3,500—but we will eventually have an entry-level one that costs in the ballpark of a thousand. You will be able to buy it in high-end retailers like Williams-Sonoma. That's less than a year out.

Courtesy of Winston Industries

The Pod

ESQ: Why is it called the Pod? Because it's like a space pod? Like in 2001?

WS: No, no! The idea is to have multiple Pods—like a bunch of grapes. The idea of precise cooking is that that each food can only be its very best if cooked in a specific atmosphere and pressure. So you have one cooking a roast, another vegetables, possibly a third cooking a trout or some other delicate fish. You don't have to worry about timing, because each Pod cooks to a precise temperature and holds that food essentially unchanged to allow casual serving—the host enjoys the party also, with complete confidence as to served food quality. We have tested this with three celebrated entertainers, including some Derby parties! It will change the way home cooks think about food.

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ESQ: I don't know if I buy that. Most home cooks don't care much one way or the other. But I do! Even $3,500 doesn't seem like a lot. Shitty gas grills cost more than that. I wish I had [a Pod]. I've seen them in action. They really are the ultimate weapon, like the atom bomb.

WS: I wouldn't say that! But I am very proud of the technology.

Check back with Eat Like a Man to learn more about the CVap rapture. If you have any questions for Winston Shelton about wet-bulb heat, vapor pressure, or what kind of a guy Colonel Sanders was, write us at eatlikeaman@esquire.com.

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